Social Media
Social Media is much bigger than just Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and all of the other well known social networking sites - it is also about online Forums, Product Reviews and Personal Recommendations all of which can be leveraged to promote your brand!
The other great thing about social media - at the moment at least - is that it is FREE! What a great marketing opportunity.
How Important Is Social Media?
Very! Over 65% of people in the UK who have, or have had, access to the internet have now experienced using social media in one form or another and this figure is growing daily. Social media has now eclipsed the 62% who have ever sent an email. That is how important it is!
Devising a Corporate Social Media Strategy
Business needs to start using social media today to start taking advantage of this free medium to help promote their products and services as this is still a relatively untapped market compared to other more traditional routes.
Social media can be used to improve your business's relationship with your customers - and hence profits - in any number of ways:
Social media allows you:
- to talk on a one-to-one basis with your prospects or customers;
- to promote the human face of your business by letting your customers interact with more than just the sales or customer care team;
- real time arms length interaction with your existing and potential customers;
- to listen and read about what is being said about your business in the marketplace;
- to find opportunities that your customers are talking about that you may be able to satisfy;
- to reward and thank customers online for the whole world to see;
- to involve your customers in product development or market research or product promotion;
- to get recordable up to the minute feedback from your customers.
Which Social Media Outlets Are Important?
The glib answer is "all of them" but in reality the major players that affect the UK are as follows:
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Facebook is the "operating system" of the social web. It has beaten off its competitors and has won the social networking "war". Facebook adds ½ million new users every day and is on target to have ½ billion users by December 2010. Every day 5 billion minutes are spent on Facebook and the amount of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc) shared on Facebook each week is 1 billion. |
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Twitter believes that it will have 1 billion users by the year 2012. If this becomes a reality it will become the pulse of the planet. Based on the number of "tweets", growth shot up by 1,400% in 2009 and in February 2010 Twitter surpassed 50 million tweets per day for the first time. |
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LinkedIn has over 70 million members worldwide and 4 million UK based users. It holds the largest collection of decision making directors & senior managers of all the social media sites and it has transformed how Online Selling gets the majority of our business leads thanks to the help and guidance of one of our clients namely Will Kintish (www.kintish.co.uk) who is the UK's foremost presenter and trainer of LinkedIn. |
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YouTube is the 4th largest site on the internet and has over 100 million visitors every month who watch over 2 billion video clips a day! Over 24 hours of video content is uploaded every minute and the average person spends 15 minutes per day on the site. |
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A crucially important though normally underutilised social media platform is a company's own blog. Normally populated with unique content, a blog is a tremendous way of getting yourself noticed on the internet. It is often the main source of link building for your website and is extremely SEO friendly. |
If interaction with your existing and potential customers is important - and we cannot think of a single business where it is not - then contact Online Selling for an informal chat on 01457 861178 or email us and we will be happy to discuss how we can help you set up and run your social media strategy.
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